By Jamein Cunningham, Donna Feir and Rob Gillezeau

Do collective bargaining rights for law enforcement result in more civilian deaths at the hands of the police? Using an event-study design, we find that the introduction of duty to bargain requirements with police unions has led to a significant increase in non-white civilian deaths at the hands of police during the late twentieth century. We find no impact on various crime rate measures and suggestive evidence of a decline in police employment, consistent with increasing compensation. Our results indicate that the adoption of collective bargaining rights for law enforcement can explain approximately 10 percent of the total non-white civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement between 1959 and 1988. This effect is robust to a contiguous county approach, accounting for heterogeneity in treatment timing, and numerous other specifications. While the relationship between police unions and violence against civilians is not clear ex-ante, our results show that the popular notion that police unions exacerbate police violence is empirically grounded.

Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics , 2021. 75p.

By The U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division

There are more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Law enforcement is a demanding, rigorous, and – at times – dangerous profession. The vast majority of men and women who police our communities do so with professionalism, respect, bravery, and integrity. But as we have seen around the country, when police departments engage in unconstitutional policing, their actions can severely undermine both community trust and public safety. Today, our country is engaged in a critically important conversation about community-police relations. This report describes one of the United States Department of Justice’s central tools for accomplishing police reform, restoring police-community trust, and strengthening officer and public safety – the Civil Rights Division’s enforcement of the civil prohibition on a “pattern or practice” of policing that violates the Constitution or other federal laws (the Department’s other tools are described later in this document).

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Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2017. 55p.

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By Tanaya Devi and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

This paper provides the first empirical examination of the impact of federal and state "Pattern-or-Practice" investigations on crime and policing. For investigations that were not preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. Other theories we test such as changes in community trust or the aggressiveness of consent decrees associated with investigations -- all contradict the data in important ways.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. 673p

By David Spencer

As a new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is appointed, Policy Exchange has published our report, “‘Policing Can Win’: The New Commissioner’s First 100 Days” by David Spencer, Policy Exchange’s Head of Crime & Justice.

The central thesis to this report is that ‘Policing Can Win’ over those who would commit crime and disorder in our communities. In addition to summarising the core issues the Met has faced over the last five years, this report sets out the three areas where substantial changes must be made:

Leadership at Every Level: Providing the leadership that the officers and staff of the Met need to effectively fight crime and keep the public safe. Fighting Crime and Reconnecting with the Public: Reigniting the tradition that only by working closely with the public will the police be successful in retaining the public’s confidence, fighting crime and disorder, and keeping the public safe. Police Officer Conduct and Competence:Eliminating from policing those who are incompetent or would break the public’s trust in policing by committing criminality or misconduct.

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  DeDuring and by the end of the Commissioner’s first 100 days in office, things need to feel different.Different to the men and women of the Met, different to those who hold the Commissioner to account, and most importantly different to Londoners. This report seeks to give the Commissioner a head start.scription text goes here

London: Policy Exchange, 2022. 67p.

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By Amy Farrell, Jack McDevitt and Stephanie Fahy

Though recognition of the importance and severity of human trafficking has grown in recent years, the identification and investigation of human trafficking cases remains a complex undertaking for local law enforcement. Effectively responding to human trafficking requires officers to notice and identify victims who often have been hidden from or had poor relationships with law enforcement in the past (e.g., women in prostitution, migrants, immigrant community member, and poor women). Sometimes officers may be reluctant to intervene in sex and labor trafficking situations due to a belief that victims were complicit with their own victimization. Local law enforcement response is further complicated by immigration issues since many local agencies have made a decision to not inquire about citizen status during routine policing activities as a means of building trust and confidence in the local community. Additionally, the crime of human trafficking may take backseat to other institutional priorities such as violence and drugs. Finally, officers must look at old problems or traditional crime categories such as prostitution through a different lens and therefore reclassify "offenders" such as prostitutes as victims.

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  Since the enforcement of the law in the United States is predominately carried out by the thousands of local, county and state agencies representing diverse environments and local crime problems and coming from a variety of different organizational structures, fully understanding how law enforcement perceives and responds to the problem of human trafficking in the United States necessitates inquiry into the specific experiences of these agencies. The majority of research on law enforcement responses to human trafficking to date has focused on the experiences of a narrow number of large municipal police departments who were perceived to be most likely to come into contact with incidents of human trafficking. In response, this project addresses four main areas: 1) the perceptions of trafficking held by law enf rcement and the preparation agencies have taken to address the problem, 2) the frequency in which law enforcement identifies and investigates cases of human trafficking and 3) the characteristics of those cases investigated by law enforcement and 4) the investigation and prosecution of human trafficking cases. Description text goes here

Boston: Northeastern University, Institute on Race and Justice, 2008. 256p.

By Magnus Lofstrom, Joseph Hayes, Brandon Martin, and Deepak Premkumar

Stark racial inequity has long been a deeply troubling aspect of our criminal justice system. In recent years, traffic stops have emerged as a key factor driving some of these inequities and an area of potential reform. Are there opportunities to identify kinds of traffic stops that could be enforced in alternative ways—potentially improving officer and civilian safety, enhancing police efficiency, and reducing racial disparities—without jeopardizing road safety?

To explore this question, in this report we use data on 3.4 million traffic stops made in 2019 by California’s 15 largest law enforcement agencies to examine racial disparities in stop outcomes and experiences across time of the day, type of law enforcement agency, and type of traffic violation.

San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2022. 29p.

By Frank R. Baumgartner; Derek A. Epp; Kelsey Shoub

Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 294p.

By Greg Ridgeway

In 2002, the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) joined with other agencies and organizations to improve police-community relations in the city. This report focuses on the analysis of racial disparities in traffic stops in Cincinnati. The authors find no evidence of racial differences between the stops of black and those of similarly situated nonblack drivers, but some issues can exacerbate the perception of racial bias.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009. 93p.

By Carl Lieberman

I examine how racial disparities in police use of force vary using new data covering every municipal police department in New Jersey. Along the intensive margin of force, I find disparities that disfavor Black subjects and are larger at higher force levels, even after adjusting for incident-level factors and using new techniques to limit selection bias. I then extend empirical Bayes methods to estimate department-specific racial disparities and observe significant differences across and within these hundreds of departments. Finally, I find that certain municipal factors are useful predictors of whether a department has a large racial disparity against Black civilians, but the most informative variables can change when considering different levels of force. These findings suggest that ignoring heterogeneity in police use of force misrepresents the problem and masks the existence of both departments with very large disparities and those without apparent disparities against Black civilians, but the variation even within departments may make identifying and treating inequitable departments difficult.

Washington, DC: Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau , 2022. 71p.

By Elizabeth Luh

Biased police officers may purposely mis-record, or mask, the race of citizens that they interact with in order to evade detection. Indeed, journalists uncovered widespread evidence of such masking among Texas Highway troopers from 2010 to 2015. I propose a new test of racial bias in the presence of masking that is more powerful than standard tests and is well-suited to explore the rich heterogeneity in bias. Using various data-driven techniques to detect masking, I estimate that 24% of 130,240 searches were masked, with over half being Hispanic drivers being mis-recorded as white when searches failed to turn up contraband. I find that Hispanic and white troopers are biased against non-white motorists, with Hispanic motorists being treated the most unfairly. Using my model, I also find evidence of institutional racial bias and ‘bad apple’ troopers across Texas.

Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Economics; University of Michigan at Ann Arbor2019. 45p.

By Jeremy West

Nonrandom selection into police encounters typically complicates evaluations of law enforcement discrimination. This study overcomes selection concerns by examining automobile crash investigations, for which officer dispatch is demonstrably independent of drivers’ race. I find State Police officers issue significantly more traffic citations to drivers whose race differs from their own. This bias is evident for both moving and nonmoving violations, the latter indicating a preference for discriminatory leniency towards same-race individuals. I show this treatment is unmitigated by socioeconomic factors: officers cite other-race drivers more frequently regardless of their age, gender, vehicle value, or characteristics of the local community.

Santa Cruz, CA: Economics Department, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2018. 37p.

By The U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Oklahoma Advisory Committee

In 1981, the Commission issued a seminal report on police practices in America, Who is Guarding the Guardians? Twenty years later the Commission issued a follow-up report, Revisiting Who is Guarding the Guardians? Both reports raised troubling concerns about insular police practices that undermine equal protection under the law. Now, forty years after the Commission’s first report on police practices, a number of public incidents involving police conduct have returned such concerns to the forefront of national conversation. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.1 The movement has increasingly gained national attention since its founding through organizing and demonstrations against racial inequality, particularly police use of force against Black people. High profile incidents of deadly force by police include the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, OH, Walter Scott in North Charleston, SC, Sandra Bland, in Prairie View, TX, and many others. In June 2020, protests against police use of force, particularly force against Black victims, became one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history, with about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States participating in demonstrations. 2 These protests started in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. The movement calls for widespread police reform and accountability for allegedly race-motivated violence against people of color, as well as calling for broader race equity in the U.S.3 On June 6, 2020 an estimated half a million people participated in public protests in nearly 550 places across the United States. As of July 3, 2020, there had been an estimated 4,700 demonstrations in all 50 states.

Washington, DC; The Commission, 2021. 26p.

By Matthew R. Durose and Lynn Langton

Examines the characteristics and experiences of persons age 16 or older who contacted police to request assistance in 2011.

Examines the characteristics and experiences of persons age 16 or older who contacted police to request assistance in 2011. The report describes the perceptions of residents about police behavior and response during these encounters. It details requests for police assistance to (1) report a crime, suspicious activity, or neighborhood disturbance; (2) report a non-crime emergency, such as a medical issue or traffic accident; and (3) seek help for a nonemergency or other reason, such as asking for directions or help with an animal problem. Data are from the 2011 Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects information from a nationally representative sample of persons in U.S. households on contact with police during a 12-month period.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2013. 12p.

By Lynn Langton and Matthew Durose

Examines the characteristics and experiences of persons age 16 or older who were stopped by police during traffic and street stops, and their perceptions of police behavior and response during these encounters.

Examines the characteristics and experiences of persons age 16 or older who were stopped by police during traffic and street stops, and their perceptions of police behavior and response during these encounters. It describes the outcomes of traffic and street stops by the reason for the stop; demographic characteristics of the persons stopped; race or Hispanic origin of the officers; and whether a ticket was issued, a search was conducted, or force was used. It also describes variations in perceptions of the police across characteristics and outcomes of traffic and street stops. Data are from the 2011 Police-Public Contact Survey, a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects information from a nationally representative sample of persons in U.S. households on contact with police during a 12-month period.

Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013. 22p.

By Emma Pierson, et al.

To assess racial disparities in police interactions with the public, we compiled and analyzed a dataset detailing over 60 million state patrol stops conducted in 20 U.S. states between 2011 and 2015. We find that black drivers are stopped more often than white drivers relative to their share of the driving-age population, but that Hispanic drivers are stopped less often than whites. Among stopped drivers—and after controlling for age, gender, time, and location— blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be ticketed, searched, and arrested than white drivers. These disparities may reflect differences in driving behavior, and are not necessarily the result of bias. In the case of search decisions, we explicitly test for discrimination by examining both the rate at which drivers are searched and the likelihood searches turn up contraband. We find evidence that the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers is lower than for searching whites. Finally, we find that legalizing recreational marijuana in Washington and Colorado reduced the total number of searches and misdemeanors for all race groups, though a race gap still persists. We conclude by o↵ering recommendations for improving data collection, analysis, and reporting by law enforcement agencies.

Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 2017. 24p.

By Alex Stepick, Steve Held, Cynthia S Hernandez, Cheryl Little and Susana Barciela

This report addresses the impact on Miami-Dade County of the Secure Communities program, currently one of the primary federal immigration enforcement programs administered by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). DHS claims that the program prioritizes the removal of convicted criminal aliens who pose a danger to national security or public safety, repeat violators who game the immigration system, those who fail to appear at immigration hearings, and fugitives who have already been ordered removed by an immigration judge.” Contrary to these policy goals, we found that 61% of individuals ordered for removal from Miami-Dade County are either low level offenders or not guilty of the crime for which they were arrested. By ICE’s standards only 18% of the individuals ordered for removal represent high priority public safety risks, and that number drops to a mere 6% when we apply local standards suggested by Miami-Dade County’s Public Defender. Interviews with detainees also reveal that often residents are stopped by police for no apparent reason and subjected to detention and deportation. Secure Communities in Miami-Dade County also has a disproportionately negative impact on Mexicans and Central Americans who constitute a relatively low percentage of the local population but a high percentage of those whom Secure Communities detained and removed.

Miami: Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy Center for Labor Research & Studies Florida International University and Americans for Immigrant Justice, 2013. 57p.

By Nik Theodore, et al.

Executive Summary This report presents findings from a survey of Latinos regarding their perceptions of law enforcement authorities in light of the greater involvement of police in immigration enforcement. Lake Research Partners designed and administered a randomized telephone survey of 2,004 Latinos living in the counties of Cook (Chicago), Harris (Houston), Los Angeles, and Maricopa (Phoenix). The survey was designed to assess the impact of police involvement in immigration enforcement on Latinos’ perceptions of public safety and their willingness to contact the police when crimes have been committed. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish by professional interviewers during the period November 17 to December 10, 2012. Survey results indicate that the increased involvement of police in immigration enforcement has significantly heightened the fears many Latinos have of the police, contributing to their social isolation and exacerbating their mistrust of law enforcement authorities.

Chicago: Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2013. 28p.

By National Police Agency

An overview of the history, organization, administration and policing functions of the police of Japan. Covers traffic police, security police, cyber security, police science, international cooperation. Includes statistics on arrests, crimes known and clear, traffic violations.

National Police Agency. Tokyo. Japan. 2001. 70p

By Roger Matthews

Armed robbery is a relatively rare but very serious crime, and the police response therefore needs to be as effective as possible. The importance of this is reflected by the national key objective on violent crime, and by the creation of the ACPO Armed Criminality Working Group whose advice was recently published in ‘Tackling Crime Effectively: Management Handbook 2’. This report summarises what is known about the extent and nature of armed robbery nationally, highlighting the very welcome reductions in the number of these crimes in 1994 and 1995. It goes on to examine the policing strategies in two very different forces - the Metropolitan Police and South Yorkshire Police - showing how the police response can be tailored to the particular environment and local circumstances. The value of proactive police work and the use of informants is clearly demonstrated in the Metropolitan Police, while the speed and quality of response to incidents was important in South Yorkshire.

London: Home Office Police Research Group, 1996. 58p.

By United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence

From the Document: "(U) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI or the Committee) has long expressed interest in reviewing the United States Government (USG) counterintelligence (CI) enterprise to identify actions needed to enhance its posture, capabilities, and responsibilities in response to contemporary foreign intelligence entity (FIE) threats. The Committee tasked the Audits & Projects Team (Team) with conducting a targeted organizational assessment of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC or the Center)--the statutory head of U.S. CI--to understand whether this entity is properly authorized, resourced, and structured to carry out its mission. 'This report seeks to (1) identify the key challenges facing NCSC in carrying out its mission and (2) capture a range of opinions from CI experts on those challenges and potential ways forward.'"

United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence 2022. 153p.